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Facing the Wall - 2021.
Picasso Gallery.
Installation view: Time Holds All The Answers, Curated by Dr. Gerald McMaster
Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, SK.
Photos by Blaine Campbell, Courtesy Remai Modern Museum.

This gallery space has been transformed by Postcommodity, the artist collective whose exhibition, Time Holds All the Answers, is on view throughout Remai Modern. Postcommodity did not create any of the individual objects in the space. However, their gesture of turning Picasso’s works around to face the wall is an art intervention. By interruting the presentation of Euro-North American art history, Postcommodity aims to symbolically shift the museum context. In this pause Postcommodity neutralizes an icon of the western art market and cannon in order to create the conditions at Remai Modern Museum that are better suited to host the collective's indigenous voice.

This Picasso exhibition, A Formative Encounter, was conceived to bring focus to the Oceanic and African art works in the museum's collection and emphasize how much Picasso and other modernist artists owed to the artists who made them. The fact remains, however, that the exhibition is presented in the Picasso Gallery, and it was the mechanisms of colonialism that brought cultural objects from distant cultures to a museum in Saskatoon.

With the works by Picasso facing the wall, the sculptures created by Indigenous artists from Papua New Guinea and West Africa are given their due prominence. They are presented as autonomous works of art, rather than in relation to the European master.